Purdue Adds To Agronomy's Online Courses For Professionals

Sep 24, 2015

By Keith Robinson

Purdue University's Department of Agronomy is expanding professional development courses through its new Agronomy e-Learning Academy following the success of its first such online course, Agronomy Essentials.

Over the next year, the academy will add two other courses - Precision Agriculture and Nutrient Management.

Because course content is available online any time of the day, the courses are designed for the convenience of busy professionals who want to improve their knowledge but do not have the time to attend classes at specific times.

Course graduates receive certificates of completion as well as continuing education units for certified crop advisers.

Riley Kenney, an agronomy sales specialist with Ceres Solutions in Brook, Indiana, got so much out of the 12-week Agronomy Essentials that he helped to recruit a colleague to take the course, which will be offered for the third time beginning Sept. 30. The flagship course, which received the 2015 Award for Excellence in Distance Learning from Purdue, helps professionals from all areas of agriculture in their job effectiveness.

"Agronomy Essentials helped me in my career by giving me a good general knowledge of agronomy as a base that I want to build upon," Kenney said. "It gave me more confidence to move ahead in my career and education and boosted my learning exponentially. The course is readily accessible, easy to navigate and conveniently organized."

The course contains 100 high-definition video lessons by professional educators, including lead instructor Bruce Erickson, Purdue's agronomy education distance and outreach director. Video lessons are supplemented with reading, graphics, glossaries, downloadable slides and tests to measure participants' understanding and retention.

More information, registration and a preview video of Agronomy Essentials is available at http://tinyurl.com/purdueagry. The preview contains snippets of video lessons from several of the 26 course learning modules.

The course will be offered again in January 2016.

Precision Agriculture will be released Jan. 13, 2016, and will be offered three times during the year, running simultaneously with Agronomy Essentials. Precision Agriculture will appeal to producers and other agricultural professionals who want to gain a better understanding of the latest technology and best practices in this rapidly growing area of agriculture.

The third course will be Nutrient Management, to be released in November 2016. This advanced course will delve into the critical study of soil fertility and plant nutrition for a variety of crops.

Housed on Purdue's Blackboard Learn site, the courses are accessible from computers and mobile devices with Internet access.

Source: purdue.edu

Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”